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As you may know, AMD's former manufacturing arm is now a part of GlobalFoundries, which manufactures chips on contract for multiple customers while remaining the source for AMD's highest-performance CPUs. Like AMD before it, GlobalFoundries is part of the Common Platform Alliance along with Samsung and IBM. The three firms share R&D costs and implement similar techniques for building chips.
Today, the relationship between a couple of those partners shifted fundamentally when GlobalFoundries announced that it has licensed Samsung's process technology.
The tech being licensed is the next major step forward, a 14-nm process that uses a new transistor structure known as FinFETs or, as Intel calls them, tri-gate transistors. Intel made the transition to FinFETs at its 22-nm process node and saw some fairly dramatic benefits in terms of switching speed and power efficiency (which are often two sides of the same coin in process tech discussions). Other firms in the industry have struggled to reap the usual power and speed benefits when moving below 28-nm process geometries without FinFETs. Most of these firms have scheduled FinFETs for the 16- or 14-nm nodes, with several delays. Meanwhile, even Intel has delayed its 14-nm process due to technical difficulties.
At last year's Common Platform Technology Forum, GlobalFoundries shared its own roadmap for 14-nm process technology. During that same event, the Alliance members admitted that their manufacturing methods were diverging since their customers preferred customization over fab-to-fab portability.
GlobalFoundries confirms that this news means the end of the road for its own 14XM process. The firm says Samsung's process tech has two key advantages over 14XM. Samsung's tech is further along in development, so the schedule is more attractive, and Samsung's 14-nm FinFET tech provides better area scaling by cramming more gates into a given area.
This licensing arrangement instantly makes the chip foundry business quite a bit more interesting. Samsung famously manufactures SoCs for its biggest rival and a huge customer: Apple. Now, some or all of Apple's production could move to GlobalFoundries fairly easily, assuming something else (like a rumored move to TSMC) doesn't change the picture entirely.
Perhaps the biggest beneficiary of this licensing deal will be AMD, who gains access to a capable 14-nm FinFET tech for the production of its future CPUs and SOCs. AMD's Kaveri APUs actually ran slower than their predecessors after transitioning from GloFo's 32-nm SOI process to 28-nm bulk silicon. Meanwhile, AMD competes most directly with the process tech leader, Intel.
If in fact AMD has some capable new CPU architectures in the works, the availability of a solid 14-nm FinFET process could be the final piece needed to restore the firm to competitiveness with Intel.
From: techreport.com
